Two days back, a fifteen year old became the murderer of his hindi teacher in Armenian street. He slashed her throat and stabbed her abdomen , effectively killing her, for writing down reprimanding remarks about his dismal performance in hindi , in his school diary . We all stand shell shocked,t his act of gruesome violence difficult to digest even in a world where such incidents are becoming common place. The Americans have been under fire , literally , from their younger generation that brings guns to the school .
How do we make sense of this incident and what diagnosis we label on it are equally important to determine our own actions in the future .
Some of my friends might put the blame squarely on the turbulent younger generation . i would like to disagree. The younger generation looks up to its elders subconsciously. We are the moral sanctioners of their vices, knowingly or unknowingly.. we provide the wrong cues for their body shots. As wordsworth said, “ child is the father of the man” .. the children right now are revealing the underlying filthiness and goriness of our society, its values and mores, deeply nauseating to someone who is willingly to sanely and objectively examine it.
Yes , my friends, these are our corpses that have come out in the open. The violence of our children are the violence of us, fathers and mothers.
Ironically, if we are to understand deeply, sadly, the knives of boys like irman have the inappropriate and unjustified role to act as scalpels that perform the debridement of our diabetic society.. We perhaps, are suffering from a disease of excess. Excess technology,excess communication, excess entertainment, excess consumerism.. but our children cannot grow into an adult at the same velocity our excess external growth mandates and requires them to be. After all, a caterpillar becomes a butterfly only at its own pace. The fifteen year old today, has in his hands , the gadgets and machines, that require the maturity of thirty year olds to handle . Now they have set about to correct that anamoly by upgrading themselves to crimes fit for thirty year old, albeit with the intention and motives of a school goer.
What does our education system set as objectives? What are our students being prepared for? These are crucial questions that need to be answered.
Take this specific case. The student was certainly concerned with his parent’s view regarding his poor performance in hindi. The teacher did nothing that other teachers all over this state do not do. She just did what has been a routine practice when it comes to students scoring low marks in examinations. She only wrote in the school diary about it.
What went wrong? For an adolescent boy bogged down by peer pressures and parental admonishments , this routine act might have looked as a violation of the teacher -student's unwritten pact of DONT TELL ON ME, teacher....after all , fifteen is an age when children first attempt to stand on their legs, it is the age when the budding adult wants to have a world view of his own; this is the age that suspects the right things and accepts the wrong things without judgement or examination; Surely, this is the age whose mores are only in the transition between naivety and maturity – the teacher who complains to ‘dad’ is ‘bad’ and the teacher who is willing to let them off the hook is ‘cool’. As an young boy , i still remember, that in my school days, the most fearsome feeling was always the moment when my class teacher informed my father about my little serenades of indiscipline.
Obviously, that was the ‘school diary ‘ hating age.The principal deficit in the student teacher interface is that the latter do not either understand or do not want to cross the boundary to understand the peculiar problems of the fragile innocence of adolescence. They actually assume the airs of a judge though this is not a wrong thing in itself in the outside world. What most teachers forget is that ‘a school is the place where they learn to live before they actually start living. ‘It does not serve well to treat them in the manner of , “ cross the line and you will be thrashed” – in other words, ‘if you judge them , you lose them’. This alienation is only bound to widen when these children are mercilessly prepared for careers in an adulthood they have no idea about.
Come to think of it. While most of the classmates if Irman might have known of his anger towards his teacher, the poor teacher would have had no clue of this vicious animosity.Perhaps , the deficit lies there.
How can the teacher not know ?
How can one be ignorant of the student’s trespass into the self destructive swamplands of violence while knowing about his or her poor academic performance . ? which is the pathology? Look at it like this. Perhaps , if the teacher had known of the student’s feelings towards her, she would have called the parent over the phone instead of communicating therough the diary. If she had done that, perhaps the pathology in need of correction – which is the delicate balance of student teacher relationship – would not have been preposterously substituted by the ‘ superfluous concerns of poor performance in hindi’.
It is sad that education has become a formula and not an attempt at the realisation of one’s own vision of life.
I could write more , about how flawed the entire premise upon which the whole complex operates- but it is only obvious that the fruits of a system that treats schools as profit making enterprises that specialise in the production of high mark scoring candidates fit to be set in motion in to the race for high earning jobs will smack of a ‘poison without an anti dote’
Because , for all the logical distortions of neo liberal capitalism that endorses this mad race of competition, survival of the fittest, etc, LEARNING can only be cultivated in the tender soils of curiosity and love. Otherwise the harvest we reap from our “educated young minds” will always bear the inevitable obituaries of innocence- irrigated as they are by the bloody red streams of violence-
The knife of Irman has actually been dissecting with a mad man’s blind fury, the fast putrefying flesh of our own children as much as it did that of the poor teacher who lies sacrificed at the altar of an obnoxious system
